The marathon Icons have been up a month now, and I 3 weeks ago I ran my first Marathon for the Team In Training, raising money for the The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, Tomorrow I run the Flying Pig marathon in Cincinnati, for Team in Training. this will be #2 of the 3 marathons that I will be doing. However my main fundraising tool is the Marathon Icons.

Thanks to everyone who has purchased the Icons, or donated. Wish me luck.

Tomarrow I will be getting up at 3am and driveing to Kansas, for my first Full Marathon of the season, running for leukemia and lymphoma society. This week was also my first stab at Skinning for Charity, with the Marathon Icon Suite.

So far it is selling pretty well, but I can use any help that the community can give me in keeping it in the public eye. Its got a long way to go to meet the goal we have set.

For those of you who have already purchased the suite thank you very much! Wish me luck, ill see you all in 26.2 miles.

Since I began running 3 years ago I have been looking for a way to bring my two passions together; Icons and Running. This year I joined the “Team In Training” to help raise money for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I am running 5 marathons this year, including the Alaska Mayors Marathon, along with my wife, as a member of the “Team In Training.” We set a fundraising goal of $10,000 dollars between the two of us. This gave me my chance to finally bring my two addictions together. I’ve done this by creating the “Marathon” Icon suite.In the Marathon Icon suite I tried to capture the scope of running a marathon by creating a uniquely colored IconPackage for each mile of the Marathon - 26 IconPacks for 26.2 miles. The result is an amazing variety and over 1200 icons that will complement any desktop. To top this all off I included three additional IconPacks, themed for the “Team in Training” so you can show your support to the world, making a total of 29 IconPackages. This, to my knowledge, the largest Icon suite ever.

Stardock has been generous enough to join in my efforts, and will donate all the profits from this pack as well, so 100% of the profits from this suite will go directly to the The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society to help save lives.

I hope you will join me in supporting this cause. As someone who has lost family to Leukemia, it is near and dear to my heart. On June 20th of 2009, my wife and I will be running across the finish line in Alaska, in memory of my Uncle, and in support of my brother-in-law. In the end it will be those of you who support me by purchasing the “Marathon” suitethat will have made it possible.

For additional information about our story, or to donate directly to the cause, go here:

For additional information about The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, go here:

If you don’t already have IconPackager, you can download try it out, get it here.

I will be out of the country for the next week, so I will be putting the Icon-A-Day tutorials on hold until next Thursday. Luckily I had found something good to post that should be able to give everyone something to play with while I am MIA.

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

Bringing LaST up to date Months ago I was asked to update the IO Iconpack for MyColors. Since IO is, at its heart, a modified version of the LaST icons, I ended up doing almost all the work need to update the complete LaST icon pack. So this weekend I was able to go through and polish off the rest of it. The result was a brand new, Vista version of LaST Cobalt.

There was quite a bit of work that went into this update, so it is not really possible to do a step-by-step tutorial of the update, rather I decided to go through and show a few of the highlights of what went into the update.

Vista User Folders: One of the biggest charges in Vista is the addition of several new User folders, as well as the new User folder structure. Several of the existing folders still worked; My Pictures, My Music, etc. However, I had to go through and create several new icons that are only used in Vista, such as Downloads, and Contacts.

Live Folders: The Live folders were the biggest obstacle in updated this iconpack, since the folder form factor is so non-traditional. So I had to do some tweaks, and I ended up simply creating a version of the Last folder on its side. With a few more tweaks I was able to make the Live folders work, though they obscure a bit more of the thumbnails than I like, but because the folder is translucent it still worked out ok.

Bringing along the rest of our friends: The original LaST icons we designed for a Mac icon contest, and then brought over to 9x, and XP, so it contains many icons that are not used by default in Windows Vista. But since I have all the original icons saved in nice, clean 384x384 PNGs. I was able to create new Vista style icons of even the most obscure Windows 98 icon. I can say that this new pack includes every LaST icon I was able to fit in it.

Even though I stuffed this iconpack with all the LaST icons I could, I there are still many more miscellaneous icons, that I currently have posted over in the Object Dock Library. I will be updating them to the new Vista standard soon.

Wrap Up:Since I created these icons I have learned a great deal, including ways to automate many of the steps required to create sub-packs. I have always wanted to create some other color versions of these icons; Black, Ruby, and such. I am considering putting these together, but I am going to wait to see if people use these. I know they are a bit dated in style. Let me know weather you would like to see a few more LaST Iconpacks, and if so what colors you would like.

About Me: You can find all my skins, tutorials, and articles, on my Wincustomize Homepage, at http:\\mormegil.Wincustomize.com. Questions on icon use and techniques, can be emailed to mormegil@gmail.com. Twitter users can find me with the user name: Mormegil.

Before we get to much further into the 2.0 update of the Icon-A-Day icon package, I want to take a moment to create a new index page so we can keep track of each step in the process.

Day 6 (Monday, August 11th, 2008)

This index will give us a convenient home for the Icon-A-Day 2.0 project. As the project continues I will update this index with links to each of the tutorials. Unlike in 2.0, this index will be organized by day, not by icon.

About Me: You can find all my skins, tutorials, and articles, on my Wincustomize Homepage, at http:\\mormegil.Wincustomize.com. Questions on icon use and techniques, can be emailed to mormegil@gmail.com. Twitter users can find me with the user name: Mormegil.

Last week I was lamenting that we were done with the simple User folders, but wait, I forgot one. I missed it because it did not exist in XP. After digging around in the original icons, I realized that we have pretty much have everything we need to make the new Search folder.

Day 15(Monday, August 25th, 2008)

The Search Folder. When I started looking around the User folder today, I noticed that the the Search folder would be pretty simple to put together. I also noticed that the existing Search folder seems to have been put together in a rush as well.

It looks like they were originally just going to do the glass bits in the Wrapper folder, then decided it was not "search" enough, so they grabbed a magnifying glass and slapped it in front of what they had. The folder has one shadow, the glass has another, and the folder has a perspective 3D look. The glass is flat, and straight out of a Photoshop tutorial.

This lack of continuity with the rest of the User folders is kind of sad considering how much time and effort went into the Window Vista icons. The good news is that we should, in very few steps, be able to create something better.

Step 2:Now as luck would have it we can pretty much just flip our existing search icon, size it and skew it just a bit, and it works pretty much perfectly with our Wrapper folder. Even the shadows and reflections still work with a bit of cropping.

Step 3:At first I was just going to put the glass in the Wrapper and call it a day, but we can do better.

Lets put a few files in the folder. They will be blank, so I remove everything but the top bars from the file. I also tweak the fill just a bit, because I want the color to wrap around the edge of the file.

Step 4:Now we simply duplicate our file 3 times, and change the color of the bar on each. Once I am happy with them, I move them into the Wrapper.

While we have them together, I go ahead and touch up the gloss on the files.

Step 5: Tonight our classic last step is made much simpler by the fact that most of our shadows and reflections are good to go. All we need to do is give the treatment to the files.

Finished Icon: There we go, a new Search folder, this time with some continuity.

Wrap Up:Tonight's icon, will be the last Icon-A-Day icon until next Thursday, since will be on vacation. I will, however, be back tomorrow with a special Icon-A-Day supplemental. Check in tomorrow night for a special surprise.

About Me: You can find all my skins, tutorials, and articles, on my Wincustomize Homepage, at http:\\mormegil.Wincustomize.com. Questions on icon use and techniques, can be emailed to mormegil@gmail.com. Twitter users can find me with the user name: Mormegil.

My original plan we to do a Video tutorial of today's icon, however after I got all the assets together I realized there was nothing particularly difficult. I realized that we can pretty much do today's icons by just tweaking our existing assets. So it looks like our first Tutorial Video will have to wait for a bit, but some videos will be coming along soon. Promise.

Day 14(Friday, August 22th, 2008)

The Videos Folder Yesterday I mentioned that the Music folder was one of my favorites from the original series. Today we will do one of the icons I was never happy with: the Videos folder.

The thing I did not care for on the original Videos folder was the film reel. Luckily I did create a clapper for the Video file, so we have something else to fall back on. So with that said, we are going to ditch the film real for good.

Step 1:Let us start by getting our assets together, and removing the objects that we don't need.

You can see our original Icon-A-Day 1.0, Video file in the line up.

Step 2:Now, just to make sure our basic composition works I move all our original assets together. If we were in a hurry, we could probably use this as our final icon, but we will be doing some tweaks to sexy things up a bit.

Step 3:The first thing I want to do is replace the film images with something a bit more colorful Iin order to do this I'm going move the film strip out on its own for a bit.

Then, using the same techniques we used on the photos folder, I bring in a new image, duplicate it 3 times, and skew and crop the images to where they fit in the film.

Step 4:Now I want to change the copy on the clapper. I do this with the standard Text tool, and the Perspective tool.

Step 5: Now we we start fixing some things. It looks like we can re-use the shadow on the video file. But we will need to crop it where it hits the back of the folder.

I can also use the shadow, for our drop shadow by skewing it and dropping it behind everything. Then I fade it out with the interactive Transparency tool.

Step 7: Last we finish off the the reflections, starting with the reflections in the folder front, and finishing up with the traditional floor reflection.

Finished Icon: Here we have our the last of our classic "My" User folders.

Wrap Up:With the Videos folder we come to the end of week 3 of our Icon-A-Day 2.0 tutorials. I'll be back Monday with another User folder, and since we are just about out of the classics we will need to create something new from scratch.

About Me: You can find all my skins, tutorials, and articles, on my Wincustomize Homepage, at http:\\mormegil.Wincustomize.com. Questions on icon use and techniques, can be emailed to mormegil@gmail.com. Twitter users can find me with the user name: Mormegil.

Today we will dive back in to the core user folder with the Music folder. We will be basing it on our Original Icon-A-Day My Music Folder, and will be using almost the same exact steps. However, because of the change in folder size, we will need to recreate almost all the assets for our 2.0 version.

Day 13(Thursday, August 21th, 2008)

The Music folder The original Music Folder was one of my favorite icons in the Icon-A-Day series. It was one of the first special folders we did, #5, and it set the standard for the overall look of the folders in the pack.

I want to do pretty much the same type of thing with the 2.0 version. We will do a nice disc or two in the folder, and scatter in some pretty candy-like notes. We might even be able to salvage a few assets, however I am going to take this opportunity to show how we make the notes, as well as the disks. We will be doing this in almost exactly the same way as we did them 3 years ago, so I recommend that if you have any questions I don't cover here that you take a look at the original tutorial.

Step 1:We can start once again by grabbing our Wrapper folder, and our original Music folder.

Then we remove the assets that we will not be able to use.

Step 2:I keep all the notes and the CDs, though I don't know if we will be able to use them. I mostly want to be able to use them to copy effects and fills from them, while we create our new assets.

That said, I quickly create new ones as simple objects, using circles and boxes. When I have the shapes, I weld the notes together. I also combine the circles together, creating an inner and outer ring for our disk.

Step 3:Before I go any further, I group our two disk circles together, so that I can apply a perspective to them.

Now I use the Perspective tool to quickly give our new notes new perspectives. I also do the disk at this point.

Now it looks like we won't have enough room to get our green note in without crowding the composition. This frees us up to move on to our fills. We will start with the CD.

Step 4:I give the main body of the CD a nice Conical Fill, copying the colors from our original CD. Then I give the center ring a gray to white liner gradation.

I give the same fills to the rear disk, however when I'm done I tint them 2 clicks black, to darken them up.

Then I copy both rings one more time, move them behind the originals, and over to the right a bit, to create the illusion of thickness. I also tint these a little darker.

Step 5: Now we need to make the inner rings of the disks transparent, which we do using the Interactive Transparency tool, and give them a liner transparency.

At this point we need to use our front circle to crop the copy of it we made in step 4, so we can have a lip yet be able to see through the "Glass." We need to do this twice, once for the inner lip, and once for the outer lip.

We do the same thing for the rear disk.

Step 6: Before we give the discs gloss or shadows, we will go ahead and move on to the music notes.

We will be doing them with mesh fills and blend groups. We start with the blend. First I draw a fresh ellipse over the bulbs of our notes. Then I copy that ellipse and make a smaller version, down toward the bottom of the other. We make the larger one the same color as our note, and the smaller one a lighter blue.

Now we just blend the two ellipses together.

Step 7: Next we draw two new mesh rectangles to give that glossy look to the rest of the note.

When we are done with the blue note we do the same thing on the new red note.

Step 8: Now we need to go through all of our new shapes and create new gloss, which we do this with our standard gloss technique. We have to be careful to crop some of the gloss on the Wrapper folder where it would be occluded by our new objects.

Step 7: Once again our last step is the Shadows and Reflections. These are a bit more difficult than normal, because we have a lot going on, and several reflective surfaces to keep in mind. See shadow and reflection techniques for more.

Finished Icon: Here we have it, the new Music folder. I think it stands up well when compared to our original.

Wrap Up:With the completion of the Music folder we are over half way through the User folders. Tomorrow we will end the week with a Videos folder. Who knows, we might even be able to do it in a Video.

About Me: You can find all my skins, tutorials, and articles, on my Wincustomize Homepage, at http:\\mormegil.Wincustomize.com. Questions on icon use and techniques, can be emailed to mormegil@gmail.com. Twitter users can find me with the user name: Mormegil.

Today I spent most of my Icon-A-Day time figuring out how to get some videos to integrate in future tutorials. Unfortunately this left me with very little time for tonight's icon, but luckily we have a quick one available; the Links folder.

Day 12(Tuesday, August 19th, 2008)

The Links Folder The Links folder is another of the new additions in Windows Vista. It is simply a User folder where the user can place shortcuts. All the shortcuts in this folder are then made available in all the Explorer Windows.

Tonight we will be able to save a ton of time, because all we have to do is take yesterdays icon and replace our Download arrow, with a Links arrow.

Finished Icon: Sadly we this was our only remaining super simple User folder icon, but here it is: the Links folder.

Wrap Up:That is it for our Links folder, quick and dirty. Tomorrow, I will be at a meeting of the Michigan Independent Game Developers, so we will have to wait until Thursday for Day 13, when we will do one of the more interesting User Folder icons, maybe by then I will know which one it will be.

About Me: You can find all my skins, tutorials, and articles, on my Wincustomize Homepage, at http:\\mormegil.Wincustomize.com. Questions on icon use and techniques, can be emailed to mormegil@gmail.com. Twitter users can find me with the user name: Mormegil.

CursorFX is a utility which allows you to have much more flexibility in the cursors
you use to interact with Windows. CursorFX users can create and use cursors that
look and feel far superior to anything you've ever seen before! Best of all, it's
really easy to create your own super-charged cursors!

DesktopX is a program that lets users build their own desktops. It does this by
giving users access to desktop objects. These objects can come in all sizes and
shapes. They can have scripts attached to them, they can be combined together to
form mini applications or turned into an entire desktop.

Publisher:

Stardock Corporation

Developer:

Stardock Corporation

Stardock DeskScapes is a program that allows users to have animated wallpaper on
their Windows 8, Windows 7, XP or Vista desktop. It supports playing video as animated wallpaper,
dynamically generated content as animated wallpaper, and more.

IconPackager is a program that allows users to change nearly all of their Windows
icons at once by applying "packages" of icons. A package of icons contains
icons to replace most of the common icons on your Windows PC.

Icons

Icons for applications and folders.

LogonStudio is a free program that allows users to change their Windows 7, Vista
and XP logon screens. It comes with several logon screens to choose from, along
with thousands that are available online.

ObjectDockâ„¢ is a program that enables users to organize their shortcuts, programs
and running tasks into an attractive and fun animated Dock. By allowing users to
have more control over how they organize their desktop, users can take control of
their desktop icons and shortcuts to have them be available when where and how they
need them.

ObjectDockâ„¢ is a program that enables users to organize their shortcuts, programs
and running tasks into an attractive and fun animated Dock. By allowing users to
have more control over how they organize their desktop, users can take control of
their desktop icons and shortcuts to have them be available when where and how they
need them.

Show off your favorite desktop configuration by uploading a screenshot of your desktop!

SoundPackager brings customization of your auditory experience to Object Desktop!
Users can now choose from "sound packages" to enhance their Windows desktop
experience. Over 30 different system sounds are supported; unique new Stardock Design
sound packages are included with the package.

Microsoft WindowsÂ® 8 is shipped without the "Start" menu. Stardock heard the cries from Windows 8
users. We put the "Start" menu back in Windows 8. We accurately recreated the most used desktop
feature billions of users depend on every day and packed it with additional functionality.

Microsoft WindowsÂ® 8 is shipped without the "Start" menu. Stardock heard the cries from Windows 8
users. We put the "Start" menu back in Windows 8. We accurately recreated the most used desktop
feature billions of users depend on every day and packed it with additional functionality.

Theme Manager is a program that changes the look and feel of the entire Windows
environment. It works by talking to existing desktop enhancement programs and then
applying a MyColors or Suite file. In short, Theme Manager is a front-end to other
desktop enhancement programs to simplify the user experience.

WindowBlinds changes the look and feel of your Windows desktop by applying visual
styles to your entire Windows environment. When a visual style is applied, they
change nearly every elements of the Windows GUI such as title bars, push buttons,
the Start bar, menu and more.

View Gallery List

View a list of all of the different galleries available in WinCustomize, which you
can then browse individually.

Explore All

Explore all available galleries on WinCustomize.

Customize This Menu

This option is only available for subscribers of WinCustomize. If you are a subscriber
it will allow you to select which categories you would like to see in this menu
from a list of all galleries available on the site. This information will be stored
on your account for all your future visits.